


Salvage

by Rhinozilla



Category: Jak and Daxter
Genre: Body Horror, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-02
Updated: 2018-11-02
Packaged: 2019-08-16 18:47:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16500764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhinozilla/pseuds/Rhinozilla
Summary: Inexperienced civilians attempt to use pure green eco to heal their wounded after a metalhead attack. Now it’s all hands on deck as the only channelers in Haven try to undo the damage that the people have wrought upon themselves.





	Salvage

Keira hadn’t decided yet which was worse: the screaming or the lack of it. At the moment, she could hardly put two coherent thoughts together, but one minute there had been so much screaming…so much screaming…that the violent fade of noise left her ears ringing.

Precursors, it smelled. There were at least five different layers of blood soaking her shirt front, soaking her arms up to her elbows, and if Jak or her father were any indication, then it was on her face too. She wanted to vomit…had already vomited until only bile came up. There hadn’t been time to do anything but wipe her mouth and get back to work. The Underground leader, the KG defector…Torn?...had been the only one to pay her distress any heed, passing her some kind of root to chew on that took the edge off the nausea.

The corpses lined the wall, carefully covered in sheets that were stained red where the fatal wounds were on the bodies. They were down to three patients, three lives left to save or lose depending on how long their strength held out.

Morons.

Keira grit her teeth as she focused, staring down at the gore on the table before her.

Hours earlier, a group of civilians had been looting the old palace ruins and found barrels of raw, unfiltered green eco. They had made off with at least two barrels of the substance, taking it to the site of the latest Metalhead attack inside Haven, just outside the port where the monsters had established their stronghold. They had tried to use it on their wounded…but…imbeciles…

She fought to stay angry as the man on the table in front of her listlessly mouthed soundless pleas for mercy, his body contorted and disfigured almost beyond recognition. Anger was easier than horror. Anger allowed some detachment from what her hands were doing.

There was a reason that green eco was diluted and processed so heavily before it was packed into the salves and ointments of over-the-counter health packs. You couldn’t just shove your hands into it and splash it onto open wounds and hope for the best. Eco wasn’t magic. These people had no training, had no knowledge of the nature of green eco, had no idea what they were doing when they started trying to use it as haphazardly as they used the health packs.

The eco had done what its nature instructed it to do. It had closed the open wounds, accelerating the growth of new skin and tissue to replace what had been damaged. Without the guidance of a channeler, however, the end results had been the fuel of nightmares. Now, her father had grabbed every person with even a fraction of channeling ability to help reverse some of the monstrous mutations that had happened.

Lacerations had closed around foreign objects in the bodies, forcing skin and muscles to grow in and around debris that had been lodged in their arms, legs, and torsos. The first casualty that they had come into contact with had had what looked like a metal coil curving through her upper arm like a snake through sand. Ashelin had had to physically hold the woman down as Samos used the residual green eco trapped inside her body to undo the damage. He had had to effectively rip her arm completely open again to remove the foreign object before mending the shredded tissue and bones and ligaments there.

For the past two hours, the triage team had been Samos, Jak, Daxter, Onin, and Keira. Keira and Daxter had had no choice but to absorb at least some of the lessons that Samos had trained into Jak all those years in Sandover. Onin appeared to have at least a rudimentary affinity for channeling eco; upon learning of what had happened, no one could have stopped the old woman from jumping in to assist anyway.

At this point, as the bodies had either been healed or covered with a sheet and removed, the team had dwindled to Samos and Keira. Her father had been working tirelessly the entire time, but even he was starting to slow down. Pecker had insisted on Onin taking a break ten minutes ago, as the woman had looked on the verge of collapse herself.

Daxter had lost one of his “patients” after spending over an hour desperately trying to repair an entire torso of shredded organs and flesh. The man’s body had simply given out under all the trauma, and the loss after so much effort had nearly destroyed Daxter. In a rare moment of civility between the two, Pecker had ushered him away from the carnage, over to where Onin was also resting.

Samos had recruited Tess in administering health packs to the lesser injuries. Even the diluted eco in the packs would act as a magnet to the pure substance trapped inside the wounded bodies. It would make it easier to channel it out later when they could get to it, and it would ease the prickling pain in the meantime.

Jak hadn’t moved in about fifteen minutes, and Keira cast him a glance every time she managed to remove her gaze from the bowels and blood in front of her. He had shoved himself against the far wall of the port, sitting on the ground with his head between his knees. She knew that after…everything that had happened…that channeling other forms of eco was not as easy as it had once been to him. Two straight hours of it had left him a shaky, sweaty, pale mess, but she attributed some of that as the nature of the work itself, rather than the strain of channeling.

Bones had stitched themselves back together at the unnatural angles that they were at when they came into contact with the green eco. Veins and muscle fibers had become tangled through the marrow of hastily repaired femurs and ulnas. There had been no gentle mending of those mutilations. The bones had had to be re-broken and forced back into alignment before being healed properly with eco channeling.

It had become a macabre melody in the background as Keira had focused on stopping the bleeding in the bodies had landed in front of her. It was the same with every casualty: the gasping plea for help, an instruction from Jak to hold the person down, the aggressive crack of a mutated bone being snapped, a scream of agony, the crunch and squish of body parts being shoved back to their correct shape, the cool hum of eco being activated and channeled through organic matter, the fading of screams to unconscious wheezing, occasionally punctuated by someone dry heaving at their participation in such treatment…ending with that patient being removed from the table, and a new horror being laid out for the same procedure.

Keira had had to compartmentalize it all. These broken bodies were just like machines that needed to be fixed. The machines that she worked on all had gears and motors and piping that had to be a certain way in order to function. She had to think of these people the same way; they were like machines…just like machines…This was just blood instead of motor oil…It was just soft, warm organs instead of hard, pitted motor parts…It was just strands of muscle fiber instead of metal wire…

Her body spasmed as she tried to dry heave, but she forced her spine to straighten and swallowed back the bile. No, she was almost done…She could do this…They were just like machines…She could fix machines…She could fix this…

She pushed her mind to the green glow at her finger tips. Luckily, the latest person on her table hadn’t had life threatening injuries to begin with, and the eco had flowed instead to chemical burns on the man’s lower legs. The skin had all but sloughed off when she cut away the remains of his pant legs, and naked muscle and gleaming bone had greeted her eyes.

There had been no saving his left leg. That was all there was to it. Eco was an aid; it wasn’t a miracle substance. Even if she had had the skills to use it to grow back two legs’ worth of skin…There was no point to finishing that thought. The left leg had had to come off below the knee, and Ashelin had mercifully hit the man on the head hard enough to render him unconscious. That first, unending, shriek of agony would be permanently seared into Keira’s right ear for the foreseeable future though.

She had folded the salvaged flaps of skin over the point of amputation where his leg ended. She manipulated the raw eco that had lodged itself in the superficial abrasions on his forearms, tracing it down to the amputation site, applying it like glue to close the hole. She could feel the skin melting together and forming an unbroken surface there. She tried to make it as smooth as possible, but there would be an ugly mass of scar tissue that she simply couldn’t help at this point.

Some of the green eco that Daxter had siphoned out of a man’s skull fracture was still left in a bowl beside her. She re-centered her mind before dunking her hand into the bowl, putting up a mental shield to prevent the substance from running rampant up her arm and into her body. She held it contained in her hand, bringing it quickly to the raw muscles and nerve endings on the man’s other leg. Her stomach churned around itself as she placed her hands directly on the open wound, releasing the green eco in increments into the other body.

She kept a careful hold over it, guiding it to the ruined edges where the skin had been eaten away. The eco grasped at those edges and caught, beginning to sew and graft new, bright pink flesh over the burns. Once it had the pattern, Keira more or less just had to keep a guiding hand on it, following it down the leg to the man’s ankle. It took a few minutes, and by the end of it, the new skin was smooth and unbroken, though it was flecked with blood from broken blood vessels under the surface and inflamed from the unnatural pace of healing.

Keira quickly turned and dumped the leftover eco back into the bowl, wiggling her fingers to rid herself of it. On the patient’s other side, Ashelin had been alternating between blatantly staring at Keira’s ministrations and applying salve to the lesser wounds on the man’s body.

“You need to sit down,” Ashelin abruptly said.

Keira felt that familiar spark of irritation, a welcome feeling after an afternoon of belligerent detachment, but as she looked up to send off a snappy retort, the world listed to the side. Ashelin reached across the table and grabbed Keira’s shoulder, and the contact was enough to recalibrate Keira’s vision. She grappled at the edges of the table, feeling as though all of the energy had suddenly been sapped out of her.

Ashelin swept around the table, somehow maintaining that contact of her hand on Keira’s shoulder.

“Down, down all the way,” she instructed.

Keira’s brain still yearned to shove her off and get back to work, but her body was happy to obey the woman. She slowly sank to sit on the ground. The solid concrete was an anchor that she clung to, and Ashelin’s hand moved to the back of her neck, gently pressing forward.

“Head between your knees. Deep breaths.”

Keira closed her eyes and did so, flattening the palms of her hands to the ground, and feeling the tacky blood on her hands sticking to the loose dirt on the concrete. She exhaled that first deep breath and hesitated in drawing the next one. Everything stank of blood and bile, including herself. She shuddered with revulsion.

“Water,” Ashelin spoke, and there was a canteen being pushed into Keira’s hands.

“Keira?” Her father was asking, somewhere close by.

Keira lifted a hand and blindly waved in the direction of his voice. “I’m okay. Just…needed a break.”

He shouldn’t stop on her account. People were still dying, still moaning, still being slowly murdered by their own ignorance…She was fine…The machines needed fixing…

“No more casualties are coming in,” Ashelin was saying, but she could have been speaking to Keira, to Torn, to herself, or to a radio for all Keira knew or cared.

No more. They were almost done. The end was in sight. No more bodies and body parts. No more screaming and begging for death. No more burying her hands inside chest cavities, seeking out the cool sensation of eco amidst the warmth of viscera.

Keira took a few slow sips from the canteen. The water tasted like nothing and was slightly warm, but it cleared some of the haze and let her assemble some more coherent thoughts.

“You good?”

Dammit, Ashelin.

“C’mon, you need some air.”

“I’ve got air right here,” Keira mumbled, reluctant to move now that she had finally stopped moving.

“This area is a bloodbath. I wouldn’t want to breathe this air longer than necessary.”

Keira ground her molars but conceded. “Can’t argue with that.”

It was a combination of irritation and begrudging thanks that she brushed off Ashelin’s attempt to help her up. Ashelin didn’t need any more than that, and she was quickly off to tend to someone else, leaving the canteen with Keira.

The man had been removed from the table somewhere in the meantime, and with no new machine to dig into…and no more casualties coming in…she saw no other place to aim her feet than over to the wall where Jak was finally sitting upright.

The acrid stench of bodily fluids faded remarkably in the short distance between the makeshift triage center and Jak. He looked measuredly better than before, tilting his head back against the wall but keeping his eyes firmly closed. As she drew closer, she could see that Daxter had made his way to his friend as well. He had splayed himself down the length of Jak’s outstretched leg, eyes half lidded and staring pointedly out at the water of the port, away from the bloodbath.

They looked as exhausted on every level as Keira felt. With that as a small comfort, she sank to sit beside Jak, leaning her back against the wall with a heavy sigh. Neither Jak nor Daxter gave an acknowledgement of her joining them, but she didn’t want or need one right then. Their little spot was so steeped in the camaraderie of trauma that Keira blended right in, and the ease with which she became part of that nearly overwhelmed her frayed nerves.

Ever since they had reunited in her garage…a year, two years?...ago, she had never quite felt that the three of them had gotten back on the same wavelength that they had been back in Sandover. Everything had been so different; they had all changed so much…and circumstances had not been gentle on any of them since those graceless interactions in Haven. So this old, familiar ease of belonging around her two best friends…after so long feeling like strangers…nearly brought tears to her eyes…if she hadn’t been so dehydrated already.

She sipped at the canteen again and then turned some of it over her hands. All of her clothes were fit to be burned as soon as she got out of them…hopefully when she took the longest, hottest shower in history…but she could at least rid her hands of the grimy, sticky blood and gunk. The rag in her back pocket was dry and the only stains were from old motor oil that had never come out, so she used that to scrub at the mixture coating her hands. She used the canteen to rinse occasionally, until she could see the tint of her own skin again.

After a while, blood was still lodged under her fingernails and in the creases of her skin around her thumbs and knuckles, but she could make a fist and release it without her hand sticking to itself. She counted that as a win for the time being and started to put the lid on the half-full canteen again. Thinking better of it, she nudged it softly against Jak’s elbow.

He finally moved, just cracking his eye open enough to see what she was offering. He gave a barely perceptible headshake and closed the eye again, exhaling so heavily that his chest almost bowed inward for a moment.

Keira frowned and did the same to Daxter. He took her up on the offer of water, moving lethargically to sit up and take the canteen from her. The bright of his eyes were dull with exhaustion and the weight of the afternoon’s demands. He mumbled a thanks…no quip, no extra words, no energy, and sipped at the water.

“That’s it then.”

All three of them started somewhat at Samos’s abrupt greeting. None of them had noticed him coming over, too wrapped up their own thoughts and fatigue.

“That’s it,” Keira repeated numbly, looking staunchly at her father and not letting her gaze move past him to the stains of red and lumps of body bags.

Samos’s expression was drawn and carefully composed, but the relief peeked through.

“You have all performed admirably today,” he enunciated deliberately. “I could not have asked for more dedication than what you displayed.”

The contradiction of his words to the bodies of the dead being loaded into transports was felt by all of them, but Samos at least looked sure of his words. Even their best hadn’t been enough to save that many…

“Tess sent for two zoomers to take you back to the Naughty Ottsel, since it’s close and…I’m sure you want to…not be here…”

Daxter managed a snort at that, but it was a hollow sound.

Keira looked at her father. “You should come too, Daddy. You were just as…We all need some rest.”

Samos deflated a bit. “Unfortunately, my reprieve will have to wait. I am needed back at Freedom HQ. Please…the three of you should just go and…try.”

“Okay.” It was Jak who vocally gave in first, to which Keira and Daxter immediately followed suite.

As they waited for Tess to arrive, Keira gave in and leaned sideways, closing those precious inches that gave her contact with Jak. He let her stay that way, their arms pressed against each other. It gave her comfort to feel someone solid and in one piece, even if he was as run down as she felt.

“You reek,” he grunted.

Keira snickered, pushing her shoulder at him a bit. “So you do you, asshole.”

By the time Tess brought the zoomers, some of the screaming echoes had finally started to fade from her ears.

 


End file.
